Thursday, January 04, 2007

Sarunas Jasikevicius Career & Highlight Videos

Today's video offering from YouTube.com is a mini-bio from around 2003 of Sarunas Jasikevicius (1994-98), describing his successes on the court in European leagues and international play from 1998-2003, before coming back to the NBA.

I've never posted anything before about Sarunas's pro career, other than that he's currently in his second season playing for the Indiana Pacers (player page). Allow me to paraphrase his Wikipedia entry. As it mentions in the video above, after leaving Maryland, Sarunas returned to Lithuania, where he played for Lietuvos Rytas in 1998-99. Next, he went to Slovenia to play for Olimpija Ljubljana in 1999-2000. Sarunas won a bronze medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics playing for Lithuania's national team.

He continued moving up to higher profile teams, playing with Spain's FC Barcelona for 3 seasons from 2000-2003. In 2003, Sarunas helped lead Barcelona to the Euroleague Championship. Then, that same year, Sarunas led his Lithuanian national team to the European Basketball Championship and was named tournament MVP. The following season, he moved to Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel, where he picked up where he left off, winning two more consecutive Euroleague titles in 2003-05.

Sarunas caught the eye of NBA scouts and American TV viewers in the 2004 Summer Olympics, where he led Lithuania to an opening round win over the USA, but narrowly lost to USA when they met again in the Bronze Medal game. The following year, he was signed by the Pacers to a 3 year contract.